The first thing you need to understand: if you don’t make some changes to your existing plan and you just go about using your phone like you do every day, you’re going to come home to a very nasty surprise in the form of a Rogers bill that will have you immediately applying for a government bailout package. I hear those are actually becoming hard to get, so you might want to keep reading.

The second thing you need to understand: there are at least three ways that Rogers is going to get you drunk and take advantage of you. And I don’t mean that in the sort of ha-ha-ha frat party sense. I mean it in the posting videos of you running naked down Yonge Street with indelible ink all of your body sense.

• Phone Calls that Hurt: Calls from the US back to Canada are billed at an astounding rate of $1.70/minute. Don’t answer calls from your friends at home (unless they’re calling to tell you that you won the lottery) since incoming Canadian calls are billed at $1.20/minute. You might think of calling ahead to Iron Works BBQ while you’re in Austin, but you better really want those ribs because that call is going to cost you $0.95/minute (hope you’re not on hold!).
• Text Messages Full of Pain: The good news is that incoming text messages are free. Just don’t reply to them (or even think of — say — trying to make plans with a group of people), since outgoing text messages are charged at the simply mind boggling rate of $0.60/message.
• Data with Very Sharp Edges: Oh sweet 3G data! Nectar of the web gods and very much priced accordingly. You’ll get dinged for $0.03/kb while you’re roaming, which means that you just paid about $10.50 if you’re reading this from my actual site on your Canadian iPhone (~350kb * 0.03 = $10.50). Hope it was worth it!

Is it really any wonder that all of their customers hate them?

There is some good news though, so read on before you abandon all technology and become a tinfoil hat wearing hermit somewhere in the northern reaches of the Great White North.

After a lengthy call to Rogers that involved putting me on hold for at least 3 or 4 minutes to answer every question, and a whole bunch of digging through their obtuse website filled to the brim with pop-up windows and other web browsing novelties from 1996, I’ve been able to catalogue The Ultimate Down South Traveler’s Guide for Rogers Customers. Here’s how to mostly avoid waking up in a gutter with a massive Rogers bill stuffed in a very uncomfortable place:

• Phone Calls that Feel Good: I was completely unable to find info about this on their site, but I’ve now added an option to my account that gives me 120 minutes of calling, over and above my normal plan, anywhere in the US or Canada, for $60/month. All of those calls will be treated as local calls, so there’s no roaming rates applied at all. If you’re a less frequent phone user, there’s a 60 minute option for $40/month. At an average of $1.28/minute for calls without this plan, I’m saving about $94 if I use all of the time.
• Text Messages Still Full of Pain: I have no good news here. I was told that there’s no way to send text messages while in the US for less than $0.60/message.
• Data with Dull Edges: There’s a little good news here. You can add the US Data Roaming Add-On to your account for $10/month, which takes data from $0.03/kb to $0.001/kb. That’s still a little pricey, but at least this page would only cost $0.35 to read instead of $10.50. Another way to look at it: the $10 you pay up front would have bought about 300kb of data without the add-on. Worth it if you think you might do more than look at a single image.

You can apparently have them add the packages for a fixed amount of time and have them automatically come off again. I’m doing quite a bit of US travelling for the rest of March, so I’ve had them add it when I leave for SXSW and take it off when I come back from my final trip at the beginning of April. I trust Rogers to actually have things activate and deactivate about as much as I trusted Halliburton with the reconstruction of Iraq, so I’ll be monitoring my bill like a hawk.

Avoid Charges Without Changes

Here are some steps you can take to avoid additional charges on your iPhone if you don’t want to make a bunch of changes to your account:

• When Your Phone is Not a Phone: Don’t make or receive any phone calls. If someone calls you, check the number in case it really is important enough to pay for and then double-click the Lock/Power button to send them straight to voicemail if it isn’t. Since SXSW provides free wireless to all attendees, install an application like fring and use your iPhone as a Skype handset (including Skype In/Out) or as a SIP client if you have access to an Asterisk box. Note that the wireless often gets completely overloaded, so don’t rely on this one.
• Inbound Text Messages Only: Receive all you want, but don’t send ‘em. Let people txt you and then you either phone them, email them, or Twitter direct message them (since your data will be “cheap” and there’s a good chance they have incoming DMs going to their phone as text messages if they’re in the US).
• Data on the Cheap: Make sure you turn off Data While Roaming so that your iPhone doesn’t run up a massive bill for you (you’ll find it under Settings > General > Network > Data While Roaming). That will switch of EDGE/3G data but not WiFi, so you should still be fine to use wireless networks you stumble across. If you’re staying in a hotel that offers free wireless (or even cheap wireless), consider either bringing a WiFi router to share it out to all your devices (and friends!), or use your Mac to share your Ethernet connection wirelessly.

Did I Miss Anything?

Know any great tips or tricks that my research didn’t uncover? Leave them in the comments so everyone can benefit!

Notes on Rates

• All of the rates quoted above are in effect on March 8th, 2009.
• Rates for calls, text messages, and data from the US are from International GSM/GPRS Roaming. Select “United States” to trigger a pop-up window with all of the sordid details.
• None of the above applies if you’re travelling outside of the US. If you thought the rates were bad below the 49th, be thankful that SXSW doesn’t happen in Europe where calls are at least $2.00/minute.

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Mayor David Miller does it, so does TTC Chair Adam Giambrone, even Toronto Raptors superstar Chris Bosh is on Twitter. So what is this latest social media application and why should you care? Watch News Hour Final tonight as we try and explain twitter madness and we want to hear from you. Send Leslie a tweet @lrobertsglobal.

It was a lot of fun to tape and great working with such a professional crew — I think I was in and out of the building in under half an hour including getting made up and unmade! Thanks to the whole team for the tour of the studio, which included hastily snapped photos of the control and audio rooms:

Global TV Control Room

Global TV Audio Booth

Earlier today I thought I would use Twitter to find out how people defined Twitter, and I got to use a few of their thoughts on the show (although sadly without attribution). I thought I would share my favourite responses here (in no particular order):

• sebchorney: “Like MSN for grownups”; or “Like being in an open-concept office, except you choose the friends &coworkers at the other desks.” Beyond warm & fuzzy, the true key benefit is the tremendously high value of distilled information received from trusted filters.
• targetvacations: connect, learn, meet, develop, engage and share > people, ideas, opinions, facts & thoughts on your own terms.
• Brydon: twitter is a half-suppressed laugh; a fit of laughter partially restrained; a titter; a giggle.
• sulemaan: “It’s like your Facebook status update but also a means to communicate w/ others like an instant messanger.” (For me anyways.)
• dwhelan: Twitter is text messaging between u & the world, a global conversation where you choose the time, place and people to listen to.
• coachkiki: Cross between overheard cell phone conversations/water-cooler/code/broken telephone.Often interesting/useful/informative. Big + great way to become aware and exposed to people, industry happenings/breaking news might not otherwise get.All in 140
• colinbowern: twitter is the public water cooler conversation
• nsedef: Real-time conversations leading to customer & industry insights direct from the source, & gauge of cons/biz news trends & buzz.
• kenseto: Twitter = open sourced conversations
• PalmerstonGroup: Twitter is to facebook what French Fries are to potatoes. Quicker, tastier, more fun, less nutritious.
• jasoneano: Newsfeed for relevant professional, community & breaking global stories & a personal forum to expand the reach of my own purpose
• bwinton: Twitter is like a cross between a chat room and a weblog, with fewer pictures of peoples’ cats, and more interesting thoughts.

If you’d like to see some more definitions, check out the Twitter hashtag #definetwitter (hashtags, a word preceeded by a hash symbol, are a way of organizing tweets around a given topic and making them easier to find later).

Here’s the video (thanks @astroboy!):

Thanks for watching!

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Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

To reset your email notification settings, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

No styling at all for this plaintext email! Just the brutal, honest, truth. Curious, I copied the URL, checked for phishing attacks, and then hit it up in Firefox. Nothing on the page to suggest that this was the case, although it looks like other people have seen a message.

I’m still wondering how they ‘lost’ it in the first place, what with this modern age of sliced bread, space tourism, and DBAs who know how to backup databases. Odd.

UPDATE: I was wrong! Following the link in the email took me to the notifications page where everything looked fine, but going to my homepage showed the message:

Facebook Email Notification Lost Message

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Facebook Verified Apps Badge

According to TechCrunch, Facebook has launched their Verified Apps program that was announced back at the f8 Developers Conference in July (see TechCrunch liveblogging coverage). Sandra Liu Huang of Facebook says that the badges will start appearing to users early next year (screenshot at right).

This will split apps into three categories:

1. Great Apps: currently limited to Causes and iLike, the two third party apps that Facebook is showing off as being best of class. Your app will automatically be eligible for the Great Apps program if you submit it for Verification.
2. Verified Apps: authenticity and trustworthiness come to Facebook Platform. Make sure you meet the eligibility criteria, submit your app for verification, and earn a shiny badge as seen at right.
3. The Great Unwashed Masses: everybody else. Will this become the App Ghetto full of throwaways that no one installs or will users ignore the badges and take a flier?

There are two things that make this an important announcement. The first is highlighted in #3 above — will this become more tha a badge of honour and move into being a serious installation criteria? If so, that feeds right into number two: it costs $375 to have your application verified and you have to renew every 12 months. That’s per application, so developers who have four or five apps are looking at $1500 or $1875 to get their badge once per year. Let’s say that Facebook Platform sees 10,000 new apps next year, half of which get verified: that’s a healty almost $1.9m on Facebook’s bottom line.

The question in my mind is about whether this is a sign of maturity for Platform or a cash grab on Facebook’s behalf. You get some nice benefits out of being verified that go beyond the badge (see below), but do they justify the cost? Looks like it if you were planning to advertise using Social Ads, attend f8, and have your app spread through the requests/notifications/emails and news feed channels (and who isn’t, really?).

• Badging
  • A verified badge graphic displayed on your application’s About Page indicating that it has been verified by Facebook.
  • A special icon displayed next to your application in listings within the Application Directory.
• Distribution
  • Increased allocations for requests, notifications, and emails.
  • Increased visibility for News Feed stories.
• Advertising
  • $100 of Facebook advertising credit.
• Events
  • Discounted registration fees to events like f8, Facebook’s Developer Conference.

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Common wisdom suggests that RockYou is hoarding cash in preparation for a downturn in advertising budgets (which is where their revenue comes from), though they say they are planning to acquire some competitors and expand operations. They’re locked in a battle with Slide for king of social app ads, a well-funded competitor with ample experience.

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Amazon.com: Facebook Cookbook: Build Your Facebook Empire: Jason Goldman: Books

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